In the Skin of a Lion

The narrative jumps to 1930, at the construction site of Commissioner Harris’s latest industrial water project in Toronto—the tunnel under Lake Ontario (also referred to as “the waterworks”). Patrick lives alone and is a laborer on this site. He has followed in the footsteps of his father, preferring more dangerous work, and his responsibilities on this project include dynamiting. Like Nicholas (who in Chapter 2 is compensated more highly for his comfort with dangerous work on the viaduct), Patrick “is paid extra for each of the charges laid. Nobody else wants the claustrophobic uncertainty of this work, but for Patrick this part is the only ease in this terrible place where he feels banished from the world” (107). Commissioner Harris exploits the laborers in inhumane working conditions to fulfill his fantasy of an ornate “palace for water” (109).

Patrick lives among immigrant communities he can never fully belong to because of linguistic and cultural barriers, but he delights in his outsider status, feeling “deliriously anonymous” (112). He is welcomed among a group of Macedonian immigrants and finds himself at the Ohrida Lake Restaurant, where Nicholas and the nun sat more than a decade earlier. Kosta, the restaurant owner, invites Patrick to a political theater event held inside the waterworks construction site. The event seems to function both as a socialist union meeting and as a propaganda theater performance. Patrick witnesses a puppet show in which a life-size “human puppet” bangs relentlessly on the wooden floor, unable to express itself in language. Patrick finds this so unbearable to watch that he leaps onstage to rescue the puppet, who he discovers is a woman. She leads him backstage and removes her costume and makeup. Patrick realizes she is Alice.

Alice introduces Patrick to her nine-year-old daughter, Hana (later revealed to be the girl in the car mentioned in the Prologue). Her father, Alice says, was a political activist. Alice herself has become a kind of socialist activist (though socialism is never mentioned by name) and uses her skills as an actress to inspire audiences through political theater. They discuss Clara and Ambrose, as well as a “revolution” by the working class, which Alice is preparing for.

The two become partners again and live together. Their relationship still seems to lack sexual fervor, but their bond is very strong. Patrick takes a job at Wickett and Craig’s tannery. A section of the chapter describes in vivid detail the repugnant odors and dangerous working conditions of the tannery. Alice easily networks with various immigrant communities, speaking multiple languages fluently. Patrick enjoys being her silent shadow. The two discuss the work of Joseph Conrad, a Polish-British novelist known for his unique non-native sensibility in English prose writing. Patrick does not bond with his fellow laborers through conversation, but nonetheless he feels a sense of community with them through their shared feeling of foreignness and experience of dehumanization at the hands of the bourgeoisie.

Hana develops into a highly verbal, fact-oriented person. Patrick enjoys perceiving the world through her absolutist lens. Hana’s favorite haunt is the Geranium Bakery, the establishment Nicholas founded after leaving his work on the viaduct. Hana introduces Patrick and Nicholas. One evening, she shows Nicholas a valise full of keepsakes, including a photograph of workers on the Bloor Street Viaduct and a rosary. These are the first clues to Alice’s former identity as the nun who fell from the bridge. Patrick later asks Alice about the photograph, but she declines to explain, saying, “That’s the past, Patrick, leave it alone” (141). Fixated on the photograph, Patrick goes to the library and searches through archives of newspapers. He finds “the story of the young nun who had fallen off the bridge, the body never found,” but the newspaper “would not print the photograph of a nun. A dead or a missing nun” (144). However, he recognizes Nicholas in the photograph in the newspaper. He realizes:

His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices […] a wondrous night web—all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day. A nun on a bridge, a daredevil who was unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night, an actress who ran away with a millionaire—the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned (145).

The next passage is a surreal sequence that floats in and out of present and past tense and first and second person. It contains the first allusion to Alice’s eventual death.

Patrick goes to the Geranium Bakery to ask Nicholas directly about the story of the nun and Alice’s true identity. Hearing his own story retold, Nicholas is filled with “pleasure and wonder” (148). On the night the nun fell from the bridge, she refused to tell him her name; now he realizes that when she disappeared and created a new identity, the nun chose the name Alice, inspired by the name of Ohrida Lake Restaurant’s parrot, Alicia. Nicholas is awed by the power of storytelling; he feels that retelling these events to Patrick has turned his past into history.

In the next section Alice recounts the tale of Cato, her former lover and Hana’s father. She tells Patrick how Cato, a strikingly charismatic young man, came from a Finnish immigrant family that worked in the logging industry. She recalls how they used to skate on the frozen lake, “holding up cattails on fire” (151). Patrick remembers the episode he witnessed in his childhood (see Chapter 1) and realizes the figures he saw skating were Finns. This is another loose narrative thread tied back into the fabric of his life. He marvels, “he finally had a name for that group of men he witnessed as a child” (151).

Eventually Hana gives Patrick a letter she has saved, written to Alice by her late father, Cato. Through this letter, Patrick learns the story of Cato’s demise. In 1921, Cato was orchestrating a worker’s strike among his fellow loggers. When the camp bosses discovered his role in organizing the revolt, he was forced to flee. He evaded capture for a long time but was eventually tracked down and executed.

Patrick is awestruck by the interconnectedness of the various figures in his life. He feels that “he has always been alien, the third person in the picture” (156), and that his acquaintances make up “a drama without him,” but he revels in his role as the “prism that refract[s] their lives” (157).

In the final section of this long chapter, Patrick remembers and “aches for” (159) Alice after her death—although that event has not yet been described. It’s clear that he trusted Alice more than anyone else in his life.